Genre

Sunday, December 15, 2013

Travel à la mode, OR aux modes (reminiscence)

***

In 1960 when I finished high school in central Texas, intercity and interstate  travel was completed by car, by train, or by bus...  Some could afford to travel by air, but that was expensive and air routes were rather limited.  For a kid on financial aid 1,100 miles from home (undergraduate years) or 1,700 miles (first grad school), air travel back and forth was out of the question.

But in one particular trip home - for a summer break during my master's work - all three other modes of travel came into play.  This must have been in 1965.

1

I'd always been attracted to the idea of traveling by train, and after living a year in Europe, the attraction was stronger than ever.  On the other hand, in the early 1960s American railway companies did not want to run passenger lines.  There were too few regular passengers, traveling to too few cities, to make enough money to keep the cars clean and in good working order or to pay the extra staff that were needed to look after the dwindling number of passengers.  The government - who had provided the rail lines themselves and was providing continuing subsidies - insisted that passenger service be maintained, in order to support full employment.  The rail companies responded by allowing frequent passenger train breakdowns and huge scheduling delays.

So the attractions of rail travel were considerably weakened.

Still, when I got started working in a large Eastern city on the famously "reinvented" New York Central Line, I gave in to my inclination and bought a ticket.  I had to take a taxi from my neighborhood way out to the suburbs to climb aboard - at about 2 a.m., I think - but I'd paid my money and I was taking my chance!
I went to sleep right away, of course, despite there being no sleeping accommodations - a thing of the distant past on U. S. trains.  I don't remember stopping at the station at Buffalo or Cleveland, but we may have done so.  I was concentrating on Chicago, where the "New York Special" ended and where I had to transfer to a southbound train.  Then, at St. Louis I would be transferring from the New York Central Line to the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Line, which used to rip by my family's home two or three times a day just at the end of the block (the station being in downtown Austin by the river).

Shortly after sunrise, though, our train began to slow down.  There didn't seem to be any reason for doing so, but after a gradual slowing process, right there in the middle of an empty field, we came to a dead stop.

It was quiet.  There was no one around to ask what was going on, but after twenty or thirty minutes, the word had circulated among the passengers that our train had evidently been going too fast, and now we had to stop until a big ol' freight train could motor on by us... It was understood that getting freight to its destination on time was more important than getting us to our destinations on time.  I was scheduled for a three-hour layover in Chicago anyway, so I wasn't worried about missing my connection.

Sure enough, after what seemed an awfully long time another train blazed by us, going impossibly fast, headed in the same westward direction, on our right side.  After five or ten minutes, we slowly began to follow...

2
Despite what you may have been expecting, I did make the connection in Chicago.  But our train from New York was late enough for me to scoot right over to Track #9 (or whatever it was) without taking a break even to look out the front door of Union Station.
...Only to discover that our departure had been delayed, so that we could wait for some passengers making connections from the north (Minneapolis?) or the west (Des Moines?)  Oh! I must have thought.  I didn't have to worry.  When you were running late, they held the connecting train for you.  Didn't they?
Only, after about thirty minutes I began to realize I had only an hour scheduled in St. Louis to make my connection to the San Francisco Zephyr heading south.
We pulled out of Union Station Chicago about 40 minutes late, I think it was.  It wasn't dark yet, so I could tell that we hadn't even left the metropolitan area before we stopped again.

3

So I was pretty nervous about ten p.m. when we pulled into the St. Louis station two hours or so after the "Katy" train was supposed to have left.  And, yes, they had waited "a full half hour," the ticket master told me, before departing.  Next train?  Well, you see, there's only the one passenger train headed to Texas every day.  The man helpfully pointed out that St. Louis has lots of good sites to visit...

I told him I'd probably just spend the night there in the waiting room, but he said No, it was cleared and locked at midnight.

4

I took my little grip and wandered to the exit.  I was beginning to remember having passed through St. Louis on a Greyhound bus sometime a few years before.  Right there at the curb was a taxi.  I told the man to take me to the Greyhound station.

He looked at me a moment, and then drove me one and one-half blocks to the Greyhound station.  That was silly, but what happened next marked the turning point on this trip home.  As I came through the outside door, I noted on the sign just below the ceiling that a bus was scheduled to leave for Laredo in about thirty minutes.  I knew that the regular route was Tulsa-Dallas-Austin-San Antonio-Laredo (with some intermediate stops too, of course).

What a stroke of luck!  (What a smart guy I was!)

There was a short line of folks waiting to buy tickets.  I took my place.  After a couple of minutes, a young couple lined up behind me saying they were headed to San Antonio, where the young woman lived.  (So I was indeed in the right place.)

After I had moved only one or two places nearer the ticket window, a man came through the big entrance doors.  He seemed a little out of breath and in a bit of a hurry.  He asked me, in a quiet voice - I clearly seeming to be the authority figure on the scene - if this was the line for the southbound bus.  I acknowledged that it was.

This man - middle-aged, with a mustache, brown check sports jacket and tie over his dress shirt - looked up and around at all of us in line and shouted: "Excuse me!  Excuse me?" he said.  People looked politely his way.

"Would anyone like a ride to Tulsa?"   He gave his name and offered to show his driver's license, and said he lived in Tulsa and just had to be home for an important business meeting by tomorrow morning.  But he was getting sleepy, and he was wondering if one of us might be willing to drive him home while he napped, in return for a free trip that far south.

5

I must have asked him a question or two.  He said it was a clear shot right down Highway 50, no turns at all.  His station wagon, parked at the curb outside, was all gassed up...

Anyway, we were not even all the way out of St. Louis before this fellow was asleep in his back seat, and I was motorvatin' over the hill.

6

And I drove.  And he slept.  And I drove.

The outskirts of Tulsa were just beginning to appear on the horizon as the first glowings of daylight began to light up the wide sky, when Mr. Auto-owner began to stir, right on cue.  As we approached town, he swung his legs around and leaned forward over my right shoulder.  His breath smelled strong, but did not reek of alcohol.  I never thought he had been drinking; he had just been sleepy.

After confirming that I wanted to go to the bus station, he guided me to the proper exit.  I believe he said it was right on his way home.  Once we got remotely close, in fact, the cityscape began to look familiar.  The bus station was on a corner in a residential district.  There was a Greyhound just beginning to load.  It was somewhere around 4 a.m. if I remember correctly.

7

I had agreed to make the to make the trip for nothing, but as he came up to the driver's door and took the keys back, the man gave me $10.  I didn't complain.

And, yes, when I asked the driver checking people's tickets, he said his bus was on the way to Laredo, stopping in Austin - as well as other places - along the way.  He said I could buy my ticket at the next station.

The man was gone, almost home by now.  I had a bus seat to myself and could settle right in to a snooze myself, with a straight, sure shot ahead of me to my chosen destination.

8

Late that afternoon I called my mother from the Austin bus station.  She came to pick me up in a half-hour or so.  When I got my refund on the train ticket from St. Louis on, this turned out to be the least expensive trip home I ever made.  It was not as cheap as hitch-hiking in Europe, but for the U.S., it was a real deal.


***